Robert Blake's Dream

Cruel concatenation of promises. Language loosed upon the world,
language loosed upon the lover’s back. Unkempt. Swish of horses, fabricated
in the dream-world of God’s (my God!’s) good mind. Good panic of what had yet
to be said. Now, never, to be. The false promise of grammar (syntactical
friction: thighs rub out). Flies forward, your beaming chest. It gets harder
to say. It gets harder to say what it is we are doing in the middle
of the afternoon near a great lake. Last summer, we walked
through a small ambivalent town. Houses tucked futures away. You missed
the dog. You never once kissed me. All damn day you’d hate me from
the driver’s seat. I watched out the window, watching what I wanted
turn to piles of salt, of sand, something about to be whooshed away
by a simple word. Something halting and life-changing;
a syllable with, no, nothing behind it.

S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in AGNI, Guernica, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, jubilat, The Boiler, among others. They are the founder and editor of the little magazine Tyger Quarterly. Smith has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern University where they study William Blake. Their first book of poems, A BOY IN THE CITY, is out now from Deep Vellum.